Nick Bryant’s new book, The Rise and Fall of Australia, is a broad sociological survey of the country he covered as a BBC correspondent. It challenges a few stereotypes that foreigners might still nurse (about drinking, anti-authoritarianism and sport) and otherwise urges Australians to live up to their potential.

There’s not much that’s new in this perspective, but the book's tagline (“How a great country lost its way”) and its intermittent Canberra-bashing, play to a proven appetite for a minor genre that we might name the "political weepie".

Weepies weave recent changes in Australian political life into a story of decline. The genre takes The Reform Era as its golden age. This always includes the Hawke-Keating governments, and frequently the earlier part of the Howard years.

The measure of this period’s excellence was politicians’ refusal to give people what they wanted. The very unpopularity of privatisation, trade liberalisation, deregulation and the farming out of economic decisions to appointed bodies is evidence that these policies were brave and sound. True “leadership” on this view is about giving people what elites know we need, even over our objections.

It was possible then because “the adults” were in charge. The press gallery, experts situated at what Ross Garnaut calls “the independent centre”, and often enough parliamentary oppositions, supported the most important measures of The Reform Era. Peak bodies — from the Australian Council of Trade Unions to the National Farmers' Federation — were willing participants in quasi-corporatist processes directed at reaching what Tingle calls an “agreement on national goals”.

The frank elitism — even paternalism — of all this is justified by the claim that these elites and experts were serving “the national interest”. But our common interests are and always have been a matter of dispute. Consensus arose from an exclusive conversation.

The weepies blame many things for our current predicament. Journalists point to the mediocrity of today’s politicians; ex-politicians tend to lambast the media for their adversarial and sensationalist approach.

But there is also a tendency to grumble about the present moment’s democratic excesses, which make it more difficult to impose unpopular policies. People just won’t shut up and take their medicine.

For one thing, the mainstream media’s monopoly on public debate has given way to cacophony. Paul Kelly says social media “weakens the ability of leaders to carry opinion and shifts media power downwards”. Tingle thinks that social media “amplify [anger] and make it uglier”. Garnaut says media fragmentation has “made the prosecution of a wide-ranging positive reform programme more difficult”.

At times this can sound uncomfortably like hankering for a time when pluralism and disagreement could be safely ignored; the only thing worse than unfettered popular opinion is the risk that it might be listened to: as Garnaut laments, “voters are more likely to support someone who tells them what they want to hear”.

Tingle worries about our selfish refusal to accept that government can no longer accommodate electoral demands. Kelly’s worries about “fashionable narcissism” and the “culture of complaint” that leads people to expect that their own values and interests might be considered in the formation of public policy. When you realise they’re talking about us, it’s chilling.

The diagnosis is never that “reform” was rightly seen as a series of impositions, and that this in turn eroded democratic faith. Instead the weepies blame our boisterous refusal to accept that this is the way we should be governed, and that this was definitively settled decades ago.

The problem with the political weepies is not their repeated claim that Australian politics is busted. That’s plainly evident in the failure to respond to our biggest problems, like climate change. Rather, it’s the genre’s characteristic nostalgia, a dream of the 90s, involving the restoration of a top-down, invitation-only, depoliticised project of political and economic transformation.

There is no reason for progressive politics to be seduced by this lachrymose version of history. Popular anger, directed at comfortable insiders, has has been the starting point of all of the left’s most important victories. The early history of the labour, environmental, civil rights and women’s movements prove this.

Popular movements also offer examples of real reform, which is always democratising: power from the margins is directed against the systemic obstacles that have served to exclude people from power. Both Labor and the Greens should remember that parties of the left succeed by amplifying the popular voice, not hushing it; Clive Palmer, for all his faults, has occupied the territory they've abandoned, with some success.

If populism is a dirty word among political insiders, it’s partly because, naturally, they find managerial political processes more congenial. But it should be obvious that right now in Australia, and globally, political outsiders have prospered by speaking to anger directed at mainstream politics.

Partly this arises from the inequalities exacerbated by the reforms that the weepies commemorate. Established parties on the left can either despair at this, or see it as a sign of hope and renewal.